Oss Odyssey
Linzi Stauvers, Ikon Artistic Director of Education and Black Country Type
Iron osses, little wenches of the sidings, watch over us
on our passings, our wum-comings;
through the Smethwicks, factories laploved and tumbled,
the trollied cut with its rainbow of sump-oil
and behind overgrown buddleia, banqueting halls
fizzing like bottles of pop on Friday afternoon
with stunned new brides and bhangra-armed grooms,
for love is a journey to an unknown station.
Excerpt from Liz Berry, Iron Oss, 2021
Kevin Atherton’s Iron Horses (1987) is a sculpture of twelve parts – life-size horses cut out of steel and coated black – positioned at irregular intervals and in various unassuming spots along the 12 miles of track between Wolverhampton and Birmingham. Intended to be seen from a moving train, each horse is unique, defined by its natural gait: standing, trotting, cantering, galloping, rearing, jumping. Moving in the direction of travel, the horses create a circuit, referencing the racecourse as it recurs throughout art history from Stubbs to Magritte.
Kevin – who is perhaps best known as a performance and video artist – took a series of 35mm photographs of the horses when they were installed in 1987. These form the basis of a slideshow, presented to art school audiences and published as a book in 2017, which keeps his intent for the artwork intact: a time based-sculpture, making reference to Eadward Muybridge (1830–1904) who used six to 12 cameras to the capture successive phases of The Horse in Motion (1878). Towards the end of his lecture, Kevin confesses:
If truth be told, as a piece of public art it was handed over to the public on the day that it was unveiled and owes its continuation as a sculpture in this historic landscape to the fact that generations of people from the Midlands have grown up with it, and feel that it is theirs. It is.
Testament to Atherton’s embrace of postmodernism, the poet Liz Berry and artist Tom Hicks, aka Black Country Type, paid homage to Iron Horses in their book The Dereliction (2021). Hicks’ photograph of a horse – located after Sandwell and Dudley Station, at the T-junction of the canal – is accompanied by Berry’s poem that uses Black Country dialect to describe how the ‘Iron Oss’ has penetrated the local psyche.
It was whilst Tom was unveiling his own public sculpture for a new travel hub in Halesowen – entitled You Are Here (2025), commissioned by Ikon and Transport for West Midlands – that I asked him if he’d located the other eleven horses. As a regular passenger on the Wolverhampton to Birmingham line, Tom was only familiar with the horses on the station platforms. He explained how, to photograph the horse at Sandwell and Dudley station, he had to clear the bramble covered sculpture with a stick. Likely, therefore, the other racing horses had been overtaken by the rewilding of the post-industrial landscape.
For Nathan Tromans, artist and Head of Art & Design at Birmingham School of Art, Iron Horses have been a feature of his daily commute from Shropshire to Birmingham for over 30 years. In the early 2000s, he wrote the song A Road That Takes You Home, based on the biography of his four-times grandfather, a miner who moved to Dudley when the industry fell into decline. The song – which is available on YouTube – is accompanied by 35mm photographs by Nathan of Kevin’s work. Taken from a moving train, the imagery is blurred, adding to illusion of the horses that, at times, appear very real.
On Saturday 13 September 2025, me and my husband, Chas, travelled by train to Wolverhampton to meet Tom for a day of detective work. Having called Kevin for the horses’ coordinates, he had provided a word-processed map of approximate locations. Tom used this and the 1987 photographs to identify the locations online, finding some promising clues via satellite imagery. Armed with Kevin’s book, the archival map annotated with postcodes, a car, Sat Nav, gardening gloves, shears, and our iPhones, we set out to find the horses. Our journey went as follows:
1. Found: The first, as we all know, stands tall on a platform at Wolverhampton station.
2. Missing: The second horse is supposed to be located near the Bilston Steelworks, before Coseley Station (approached on the left). The archived picture shows the horse galloping close to the track, in front of quarried landscape. Tom struggled to find this horse on Google Maps, and tasked Chas and I with filming the journey from Coseley Station. Despite painstakingly watching the footage in slow motion, several times, we couldn’t locate it.
3. Found: I spotted horse no.3 on a train journey from Preston. It clearly stood out in a sunlit field. Tom parked the car by ‘The Cracker’ – a green space between the railway track and a housing estate. We walked through a small woodland towards the field where a congregation of lads was near the horse. Rusted and rickety, this is clearly the most loved of the horses. Leaning back, likely due to children climbing onto its back, someone has reinforced its tail with a metal strip. A lick of red tape around its ear suggests it has recently been used as a prop for a St George’s flag.
4. Found: As we passed Dudley Port Station, the paddock pictured in Kevin’s book is now surrounded by trees and bushes. After scouting around for an obvious entrance, we gave up and clambered over the fence. Missing its tail, but still in good shape, it was accompanied by a beautiful black and white pony, sporting a floppy fringe reminiscent of Neil from The Young Ones and quite happy to pose with its counterpart for Tom’s photoshoot. Quite a find, considering Kevin believed this one to be lost.
(Lunch – Steak and kidney puddings, battered chips and gravy, washed down with real ale and a coke for the driver at Mad O’Rourke’s Pie Factory, Tipton.)
5. Missing: A shadow on a satellite image suggests this horse is still standing on a stretch of industrial estate parallel to the railway line in Sandwell. We narrowed this down to a small patch of land within the area of Granite UK, which closed just before we arrived. Access will have to be granted by these purveyors of granite, marble and porcelain worktops. Even if this horse is no longer around, given Granite UK have over 25 years of experience, is it possible they might know the fate of the fifth horse?
6. Found: My Ikon colleague sent me a snap of sixth horse near the tunnel at Smethwick Rolfe Street. The top of its head can be seen over the bridge wall, facing the looming threat of a large buddleia. Tom’s collapsable stepladders meant we could photograph the full horse, dramatically rearing on its hind legs. From the back, it looks like the horse is in good condition.
7. Missing, but replaced: The seventh horse, originally positioned near the Birmingham New Street tunnel, was removed in the 1990s. Kevin made the replacement horse, which stands on platform 7 at Birmingham New Street. A googly eye has been affectionately affixed to the top of its long nose.
8. Found: Tom recognised the building in the background of Kevin’s photograph as Smethwick Library. The 1983 saplings are now fully mature trees, disguising the horse from the North Western bypass. It started raining, heavily, and Tom had forgotten to pack his anorak. We scrambled down the bank towards the horse, which has lost most of its black coat. There is the addition of a picket fence, possibly making it hard to spot from a moving train.
9. Found: We decided to skip the ninth horse because it has already been documented by Tom. His slick digital photograph of the rusted equine – incidentally Kevin’s favourite horse – has since been used on the inner cover of Big Special’s National Average (2025) album cover (available in all good record shops).
10. Found, but relocated: In 2022, the Express and Star reported that one of horses had been saved from the scrapyard by a group of volunteers who found it flattened, hacked apart and buried. The group restored the sculpture, named it ‘Rosie’ and placed it on a plinth, surrounded by elegant planting, on the platform at Coseley Station – approximately 500m from its original
11. Found: The eleventh horse is leaping over a wooden fence by the carpark to Coseley Station. It will be difficult to see from the train because it has lost most of its coat, camouflaging it amongst the trees on the side of the track.
12. Missing: The final horse is pictured in front of a Victorian tram shed next to Wolverhampton Railway Station. We couldn’t see the horse from a distance and have requested access to the site owned by Network Rail.
We’re now looking to present our findings to Transport for West Midlands, creating a case for the restoration of the horses in time for their 40th anniversary in 2027.
As part of our research, we’d love to hear your memories of the sculpture. Do you remember them being installed? Have you any photos of them that you can send us?
If anyone has information on the missing horses – numbers 2, 5 and 12 – please email us.
education@ikon-gallery.org.